“It’s a new day for Cisco, and it’s a new day for all our customers,” announced Dave West, Cisco’s president of Asia Pacific, Japan, and Greater China, in a Cisco Live Melbourne ’24 keynote address.

That’s because no other company, he believes, can meet the accelerating challenges of networking, security, and AI like Cisco.

“We are revolutionizing the way you connect and protect every aspect of your organization in the AI era,” West said before a crowd of 6,000 customers, partners, journalists, and industry analysts. “To be a great networking company, you have to be a great security company; to be a great security company you have to be a great AI company; and to be a great AI company you have to be a great data company. Cisco has all of this.”

Cisco Live’s theme was “Go Beyond.” And from Wi-Fi 7 and Secure Access to Splunk and AppDynamics, there was no shortage of new innovations. And for Cisco, innovation is all about the customer, whether hyperscalers or smaller businesses.

“We’re ready to help you innovate, compete, and make amazing things happen,” West stressed, “for your customers, your workforce, and your business.”

And in a world that’s changing at a blistering pace — thanks to AI and other emerging technologies — building the foundation for that rapidly arriving future is what Cisco’s all about. As West explained, it comes down to modernizing your infrastructure, a relentless focus on cybersecurity, and understanding what AI means for your business — and how you can use it to get the most out of your data.

Cisco is laying the foundation for that future with products and solutions that are powered by AI — and enable AI — products that are available today, like Unified Observability Experience from Cisco and Splunk, ThousandEyes, Nexus Hyperfabric AI, and Hypershield security.

“AI is today’s big transition,” West said, “and at Cisco, we’re not focussed on the hype, we’re focused on how it can help.”

That means future-proofing data centers to be AI-ready, using AI to transform how people work and serve customers, and ensuring that data centers, work environments (wherever they may be in the hybrid work era), and highly distributed endpoints are secure and resilient, even against AI-generated threats.

Integrated platform solutions and home-grown innovation

Picking up the AI and security theme was Tom Gillis, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Security Business Group (SBG). Gillis began by emphasizing Cisco’s organic, in-house innovation and platform approach — which integrates across all domains, whether data center, security, collaboration, or beyond.

An AI-native product like Hypershield, he said, “wouldn’t even have been possible two years ago.”

“We have a single product development organization,” Gillis further explained, “which means that we prioritize integration first. It’s about building startlingly great products that leverage what we’re great at, which is the network infrastructure.”

Again citing Hypershield, he added, “we take security out of the box that it used to come in and we literally melt it into the fabric of the network. So, it won’t be a separate appliance.”

Cisco’s AI Assistants are another example.

“We have released a series of AI-powered assistants, and these are not separately developed,” Gillis said. “These are all built in one framework. And when we support a particular product with our AI assistant, we call it a skill. And so, what’s in the market today is a skill for Cisco XDR, a skill for our CX, a skill for our collaboration, Control Hub, Duo, Firewall, ThousandEyes.”

It’s a range of capabilities that are growing all the time.

“At the show here today,” Gillis announced, “we’re extending those skills to include Meraki and also SD-WAN. So, Cisco XDR could say, ‘oh, we’ve identified suspicious behavior on that laptop,’ and pass that information through the AI Assistant to the Meraki console, which says, ‘Hey, we think this is a ransomware attack. Do you want to quarantine this machine or limit the blast radius?’ That’s just one example of how this integrated approach to AI is going to illustrate the power of the platform approach.”

Of course, Cisco’s ultra-powerful, lower-energy Silicon One architecture makes it all possible.

“These chips are amazing,” Gillis said, “and when you couple a complete stack from silicon to the systems, the boxes they run into the software that runs on them, you can create an ultra-reliable solution.”

Nexus Hyperfabric — network management, reinvented

Gillis then introduced Kevin Wollenweber, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Networking — Data Center and Provider Connectivity organization. He elaborated on Cisco’s Nexus HyperFabric,” which he called a “reinvention of how customers think about their network fabrics.”

“Data center is going to be the critical component of everything that we do,” Wollenweber said, “So, things like a cloud-managed controller take away the complexities of having to drive infrastructure and servers and all the things you need to actually run a network, so that you can focus on what you get out of the network and not running the network itself.”

As for the future, Wollenweber insisted, “integration is the name of the game.”

“You’re going to see a lot more rapid innovation from the networking products,” he continued. “You’re going to see more GPUs, you’re going to see 1.6 terabyte ethernet, and a hundred terabyte ASICs and a whole bunch of cool stuff, all delivered in integrated solutions that are practical for the enterprise to operationalize and deploy.”

Wi-Fi 7 and next-gen collaboration for the workplace future

As Will Etherton, Cisco SVP and head of network engineering for Cisco, said, “the workplace can’t work without the network.”

This has never been truer than today. 

“Not only do we need to connect users,” Etherton said, “but smoke alarms, fire alarms, security systems, HVAC systems, cameras in hospitals, medical devices and in factories, all those cool AI humanoid robots. All of this now needs to be connected by the network.”

With its high-density capacity and low latency, Wi-Fi 7 is the answer. And Cisco is ready with next-wave, highly secure Wi-Fi 7 innovations integrated with Cisco Spaces and combined with a simplified licensing approach.

“Today,” Etherton said, “I am thrilled to announce Cisco Wi-Fi Access Points. Wi-Fi 7 from Cisco is intelligent quad radios. It is security built in. It is assured from the beginning with ThousandEyes. So, from the user device through the access point, the switch, all the way to the wide-area network, with Wi-Fi 7, the network just works.”

In the hybrid-work era, the workplace is all about collaboration. And Vanessa Sulikowski, a Cisco distinguished systems engineer, announced a new solution called Distance Zero, which integrates with Cisco’s AI-powered, Webex-based collaboration devices — but is interoperable with other collab solutions like Microsoft Teams.

“Our collaboration devices connect and sit alongside all of the other devices as a key part of your network,” Sulikowski explained. “And just like your access points, your switches and your cameras, our collaboration devices are sensors. They can sense telemetry data on room occupancy and environmental metrics. And this data can feed into Cisco Spaces to provide workspace visibility and analytics. And they also integrate with ThousandEyes to provide even greater visibility on troubleshooting. Think of it as an integrated extended network.”

The ultimate goal? A seamless, unified experience for those in the meeting room or a thousand miles away.

For digital resilience, Splunk + ThousandEyes

Cisco’s acquisition of Splunk is well on the way to supercharging nearly all Cisco solutions and products. And Tom Casey, SVP and general manager for products and technology, Splunk, shared how Splunk is supercharging products like ThousandEyes and AppDynamics to take digital resilience and visibility to the next level.

“ThousandEyes can get you to the root cause of a problem in a hurry and tell you whether you should pay attention or not,” he said. “And it uses AI models and correlation around all of that network data and information allowing us to pinpoint the changes that we need to make or the things we might need to roll back in the environment to get back to green and healthy in a hurry.”

Casey added that as observability becomes an ever more complex challenge, Cisco and Splunk make it manageable.

“We’re able to operate in owned and unowned networks bringing together Cisco’s understanding of the network at a depth level,” Casey said. “And with Splunk’s history of cross correlating large volumes of data, we are now able to operate not only on owned and unknown networks but be differentiated by having application performance management with AppDynamics for traditional applications.”

As Dave West concluded in his closing comments, “I hope you saw the power of the network with security, observability, and collaboration, all the innovations and great insights. Innovation is alive and well at Cisco.”